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23 March 2017

A new series of untruths, canards, lies and misinformation that are repeated
with regard to trans history.

_________________________________

We know how this canard started.

Martin Duberman. Stonewall :190-2.

“Sylvia Rivera had been invited to
Marsha P. Johnson’s party on the night of June 27, but she decided not to go. …
No, she was not going to Marsha’s party. She would stay home. … But then the
phone rang and her buddy Tammy Novak – who sounded more stoned than usual –
insisted that Sylvia and Gary join her later that night at Stonewall.
Sylvia hesitated. If she was going out at all … she would go to Washington
Square [bar]. She had never been crazy about Stonewall. …. But Tammy absolutely
refused to take no for an answer and so Sylvia, moaning theatrically,
gave in. …. Rumor had it that Marsha Johnson, disgusted at the no-shows for her
party, was also headed downtown to Stonewall, determined to dance
somewhere. Sylvia expansively decided that she did like Stonewall after
all …. When the cops came barrelling through the front door.”

Note that Duberman says Marsha’s party – not birthday party!

This altered somewhat in the retelling.

Here is part of the IMDB summary of
the plot of the recent film, Happy Birthday, Marsha! :

“It's a hot summer
day in June, 1969. Marsha throws herself a birthday party and dreams of
performing at a club in town, but no one shows up. Sylvia, Marsha's best friend,
distraught from an unsuccessful introduction between her lover and her family,
gets so stoned she forgets about the party. After encountering a series of
micro-aggressions from street harassment to tense encounters with the police
that day, Marsha and Sylvia eventually meet at the Stonewall Inn to finally
celebrate Marsha's birth. When the police arrive to raid the bar, Marsha and
Sylvia are the first to fight back.”

Happy Birthday, Marsha! is of course a lot more trans positive than
Roland Emmerich’s Stonewall that came out a few month’s earlier.

However, there are two problems:

A) Was Sylvia Rivera even at Stonewall on the first night of the riots? David
Carter in his Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked The Gay Revolution, 2004,
does not even mention Sylvia. Very annoyingly he does not give any reason in the
book for Sylvia being missing. However he was interviewed by Gay.Today on this very
question and answered:

"Yes, I am afraid that I could only conclude that Sylvia's account of her
being there on the first night was a fabrication. Randy Wicker told me that
Marsha P. Johnson, his roommate, told him that Sylvia was not at the Stonewall
Inn at the outbreak of the riots as she had fallen asleep in Bryant Park after
taking heroin. (Marsha had gone up to Bryant Park, found her asleep, and woke
her up to tell her about the riots.) Playwright and early gay activist Doric
Wilson also independently told me that Marsha Johnson had told him that Sylvia
was not at the Stonewall Riots.”

B) The consensus is that Marsha Johnson’s birthday was 24 August 1945. It
could well be that she proposed a party on 27 June, but it was not a birthday party!

On the other hand, some sites seem to have worked backwards and assumed
Marsha’s birthday from the date of the Stonewall riot (they also for some reason add one year to her age):

The Radical
Notion says: “Marsha P. Johnson was born on June 27, 1944”.

Transgender
Equality says: “Disappointed that no one had shown up for a party to
celebrate her 25th
birthday, Marsha P. Johnson headed to the Stonewall Inn on
the evening of June 27, 1969”.

Femmes
Fatales at Penn State University says: “Marsha P. Johnson was celebrating
her 25t
h birthday at Stonewall during the early morning hours of June 28th, 1969
when the police began a raid of Stonewall”.

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About Zagria

I have a social science degree. I spent several years in the 70s doing Gay Lib counselling, and moved on to organizing trans groups. I was rejected by the Clarke Institute (now CAMH) in the mid 1980s, probably because I do not match either of their stereotypes, but was accepted by Russel Reid on our first meeting in late 1987, and had surgery from James Dalrymple some months later. I have mainly worked as an IT consultant. I have been with the same husband for 45 years.